Yes folks, that's right...not only has man not caused the Earth to warm, it is likely not warming at all.

Quote:

Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

Right. The countdown to someone posting the hockey stick graph is on....

I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.

Wow, four sites have temperature data that agree with each other. D'oh!

Oh, and it's nice that this source has links to the underlying data, makes my job really easy!

So I took the HadCRUT3 data set (easiest to import into Excel), the time series goes back to January 1850 (as does the GISS data set), N (data points) = 1897.

I then took a 12-month lag window of the entire data set (reducing N by 12 to 1885) and sorted in ascending order of temperature data, turns out that 16 events exceed this one, so that this is approximately a 3 sigma event. Cool!

The entire 12-month lag window data set is, of course, randomly distributed with each month having 157 points (one month had 158 since 1885 isn't divisible by 12)

I then dusted of my extreme value theory tool box to take a closer look at the data set, by windowing the data to exclude the middle 83.3 (or 5/6) percent (i. e. only including the lowest 8.33 (or 1/12) percent and the highest 8.33 (or 1/12) percent). Thus, the reduced data set consisted of 314 extreme events.

The distribution of these extreme events had the following monthly distribution;

Well, that year-to-year extremes are much more likely to occur in the winter than in the summer, that the extremes are not randomly distributed, and that the peak of the distribution is centered on the DEC-FEB timeframe (n = 146), and the trough of the distribution is centered on the JUN-AUG timeframe (n = 33). D'oh! In other words, winters exhibit ~ 4.4 times the variability as do summers for temperature extremes.

We now have conclusive proof that summers are hot and have less variability of extreme events, and that the winters are cold and have greater variability of extreme events.

As if we didn't already know this.

Hey SDW10000BC do you have any more interesting AGW contrarian links that I can pick apart?

Whew, for a second there I thought global warming deniers didn't exist anymore.

They do, but they are so much nicer to deal with than the sun warming deniers.

Also Frank.... did anyone here claim that there was more or an equal number of extremes in say.. the summer season as opposed to winter?

Your whole point seems like a gigantic strawman?!?

I mean it is akin to saying... "Yes but ran all the data and it turns out that winter is the time record snowfall and coverage is likely to occur and not summer, spring and fall so... HA! You suck!"

I don't think anyone was suggesting comparing apples to oranges here. The articles reference measurements made year over year or events that were pointed at as significant that have turned out to be temporary or have reversed.

So one cold month negates years of consistent warming? I thought the anti-science people had given up on challenging warming, and had given up on challenging that it's man-made, and had just gone on to complaining that Gore has a big house?

It is kind of a mystery why we have warmed as little as we have in the 20th century (even counting for global dimming). The temperature and CO2 graphs for the last 400,000 years line up almost exactly (every wiggle matches), except for the 20th century where the CO2 skyrockets and the temperature barely goes up at all.

And before somebody says "water vapor is a greenhouse gas, blah blah blah" - the absorption and reflection bands for CO2 and water vapor don't overlap, the figured this out almost 100 years ago.

So one cold month negates years of consistent warming? I thought the anti-science people had given up on challenging warming, and had given up on challenging that it's man-made, and had just gone on to complaining that Gore has a big house?

Naw, we are still taking that anti-science position that the sun does all the warming.

Sure it does but changes should be attributed first the sun and clearly that has not been ruled out in a satisfactory manner. People who put humans before the sun are just as guilty as those who put the earth in the center of our solar system.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dutch pear

That's not anti-science! Just incomplete:

the sun does all the warming and greenhouse gasses trap this warmth in the atmosphere so we don't freeze to death at night and conditions are generally favorable to life.

There, FTFY

Yet no one would dare suggest even with that trapping that the often 30+ degree F swing in temperature from day to night is human attributable. Think about the entire energy output of the sun and think about if 1 degree C change on earth even amounts to a rounding error in that consideration.

Yet no one would dare suggest even with that trapping that the often 30+ degree F swing in temperature from day to night is human attributable. Think about the entire energy output of the sun and think about if 1 degree C change on earth even amounts to a rounding error in that consideration.

Have you ever been inside a greenhouse? They are much warmer than the surrounding area - but wait, that is impossible because all the energy for that heat comes from the sun!

We know for absolute certainty that human production of CO2 is causing (some of) the global warming, because the mechanism is well understood, just like we know why greenhouses get hot and stay hot. Personally, I think that the human caused global warming is very large, it is just being hidden by the factors that would normally have us sliding back out of the inter-glacial into a full blown ice age.

Wow, four sites have temperature data that agree with each other. D'oh!

Oh, and it's nice that this source has links to the underlying data, makes my job really easy!

So I took the HadCRUT3 data set (easiest to import into Excel), the time series goes back to January 1850 (as does the GISS data set), N (data points) = 1897.

I then took a 12-month lag window of the entire data set (reducing N by 12 to 1885) and sorted in ascending order of temperature data, turns out that 16 events exceed this one, so that this is approximately a 3 sigma event. Cool!

The entire 12-month lag window data set is, of course, randomly distributed with each month having 157 points (one month had 158 since 1885 isn't divisible by 12)

I then dusted of my extreme value theory tool box to take a closer look at the data set, by windowing the data to exclude the middle 83.3 (or 5/6) percent (i. e. only including the lowest 8.33 (or 1/12) percent and the highest 8.33 (or 1/12) percent). Thus, the reduced data set consisted of 314 extreme events.

The distribution of these extreme events had the following monthly distribution;

Well, that year-to-year extremes are much more likely to occur in the winter than in the summer, that the extremes are not randomly distributed, and that the peak of the distribution is centered on the DEC-FEB timeframe (n = 146), and the trough of the distribution is centered on the JUN-AUG timeframe (n = 33). D'oh! In other words, winters exhibit ~ 4.4 times the variability as do summers for temperature extremes.

We now have conclusive proof that summers are hot and have less variability of extreme events, and that the winters are cold and have greater variability of extreme events.

As if we didn't already know this.

Hey SDW10000BC do you have any more interesting AGW contrarian links that I can pick apart?

I really think you've gone overboard here. Of course extreme variances are going to throw the averages off. Duh. But doesn't this apply to all previous years' measurements as well? in other words, doesn't the obvious apply to them as well?

Additionally, how do you explain the anecdotal examples? Snow in Baghdad? Extreme cold and snow cover in North America? Let me guess..."global warming causes unpredictability."

I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.

Yes, you muppet, weather and the ecosystem are complex interdependent systems. Which is why short-term patterns are hard to predict but long-term trends reveal themselves through data.

Your laughie at the end of your sentence shows you don't understand science. Not that you've failed to grasp this issue, but that you don't understand fundamental science. It makes you look ignorant. Not clever.

For example, the Pentagon in 2004 stated there was a good chance that 'global warming' could lead to the UK freezing as the changes to global oceanic heat conveyers stopped conveying heat to the UK. Which is more northerly then every major Canadian city.

And by the way, Mr. Scientist, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data' as the saying goes, but you're clevererererere then all the scientists so you probably knew that.

[QUOTE=e1618978;1221397] Have you ever been inside a greenhouse? They are much warmer than the surrounding area - but wait, that is impossible because all the energy for that heat comes from the sun!QUOTE]

It is a percentage warmer than the surrounding area that is correct. However if it somehow managed to become a percentage warmer or cooler ABOVE what the actual glass/plastic.etc. materials should influence, then you would attribute that to some activity within the greenhouse. We have not done this yet. We are just noting the greenhouse is a couple degrees warmer, are unwilling or unable to check the outside temperature and are assuming we did something inside the greenhouse.

We are probably a lot closer on this than you might imagine. I'm just not of the alarmist view regarding climate change nor am I willing to make some logical leaps associated with those trying to use it to control people and their lifestyles. We need to fully understand the output of the sun before we attempt to attribute our actions as PRIMARY in this matter.

Quote:

We know for absolute certainty that human production of CO2 is causing (some of) the global warming, because the mechanism is well understood, just like we know why greenhouses get hot and stay hot. Personally, I think that the human caused global warming is very large, it is just being hidden by the factors that would normally have us sliding back out of the inter-glacial into a full blown ice age.[/

That is an interesting view and one that would actually have us contributing to our own deaths if we took corrective actions. Interesting...

I really think you've gone overboard here. Of course extreme variances are going to throw the averages off. Duh. But doesn't this apply to all previous years' measurements as well? in other words, doesn't the obvious apply to them as well?

Additionally, how do you explain the anecdotal examples? Snow in Baghdad? Extreme cold and snow cover in North America? Let me guess..."global warming causes unpredictability."

I went overboard, once I temperature sorted the 12-month lagged time series from minimum (largest drop) to maximum (largest rise), the corresponding dates at each end of this distribution were overwhelmingly during the winter months,

Sixteen events had a larger magnitude than the 0.595 from January 2007-8, seven of these 16 events had larger temperature drops;

So 75 percent of these events (or 12 of 16) occurred in the DEC-FEB winter quarter, while only one of these 16 events occurred in the JUN-AUG quarter.

So much for going overboard.

To change the mean significantly, monthly changes must be cumulative, or predominately on one side of the pre-existing trend. If increased extremes cancel each other out (sigma increases) but the mean continues as it did prior to a series containing the larger variances.

Also remember that a 5-year moving average of the global monthly means are usually taken, which removes most of the yearly seasonal trends. This is done to better understand long term behavior of the temperature data, and to give the trent line a less chaotic appearance.

Like I already stated this current drop in temperature is significant, as it's three sigma using the entire period of record. But if I were to just look at the extremes during the 3-month winter season (DEC-FEB), this event drops down to less than three sigma (13/472 = 2.75%, where three sigma ~ 1%, and two sigma ~ 5%).

And yes, we could have a cooling period lasting several years/decades, the records show previous decadal cooling events, but is this one of them? I don't know, we don't have a long enough period of cooling, as of yet, to confirm a long term cooling trend. Heck, this is a very active area of research, ENSO, PDO, NAO, etceteras.

Every eye fixed itself upon him; with parted lips and bated breath the audience hung upon his words, taking no note of time, rapt in the ghastly fascinations of the tale. NOT!

—No, your house is on fire. I can see it. Your neighbour has called the fire brigade. They're here, and they said 'Yes, definitely, textbook fire'. The police are here. Another neighbour is helping to get your dog out of the garden. I've been taking the temperature of your garden, and it's really, really hot. The consensus is, according to specialists who deal with fires and governmental bodies, and my own scientific training, that your house is on fire.

—It is the consensus of an alarmist position.

—I sent the findings to 'HouseFire: The International Journal of Housefires', and my facts were checked independently. My peers noted the fact that your house was on fire according to my findings and evidence (mostly pictures of your house, burning down), and said 'Yep. That's a house fire.'

No, your house is on fire. I can see it. Your neighbour has called the fire brigade. They're here, and they said 'Yes, definitely, textbook fire'. The police are here. Another neighbour is helping to get your dog out of the garden. I've been taking the temperature of your garden, and it's really, really hot. The consensus is, according to specialists who deal with fires and governmental bodies, and my own scientific training, that your house is on fire.

To be fair, those same neighbors were saying just last week that the house was *not on fire enough*.

I am stretching things pretty thin here with the analogy, but it wasn't long ago that the consensus of scientists was that the earth was dangerously cooling.

No, your house is on fire. I can see it. Your neighbour has called the fire brigade. They're here, and they said 'Yes, definitely, textbook fire'. The police are here. Another neighbour is helping to get your dog out of the garden. I've been taking the temperature of your garden, and it's really, really hot. The consensus is, according to specialists who deal with fires and governmental bodies, and my own scientific training, that your house is on fire.

It is the consensus of an alarmist position.

I sent the findings to 'HouseFire: The International Journal of Housefires', and my facts were checked independently. My peers noted the fact that your house was on fire according to my findings and evidence (mostly pictures of your house, burning down), and said 'Yep. That's a house fire.'

-Alarmists.

You really are a massive knobcheese, aren't you?

Ad-hom. I'm done with you.

Well the scientific consensus has sea levels rising 40 cm versus the Gore suggested 7 or more meters. Gore claims it would displace millions when that won't happen as an example.

So to fix your analogy it is more like you are cooking yourself dinner and the flame being used to make the meal is called in by your neighbor as a four alarm fire which requires you vacate the premise. While you are outside dealing with the fire engine and fire chief he comes in and steals your belongings. When questioned about it, he claims the good intention of protecting you from fire which is a very dangerous thing.

Obviously I believe that the greenhouse effect is being caused by human produced CO2 - but saying "the majority of scientists believe" is not a 100% watertight argument. What was going on then was "global dimming" - cooling caused by air pollution blocking sunlight, and it went away after the clean air act.

My point is that scientists were "sure" that we were going to get colder, and they changed their mind later when more information came in. I don't think that anyone has a good enough model of the hydrosphere and atmosphere to predict future climates 100%, so there is quite a good chance of new data coming in and changing the "consensus of concerned scientists" yet again.

Two things are pretty certain - human caused CO2 is contributing to our changing climate, and human caused CO2 is not the only thing changing our climate. For one thing, if it was just human CO2, the temperature should have jumped much higher than it has done.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hassan i Sabbah

Don't care. The house is burning down. Right now.

I have another neighbour who says that the Holocaust never happened, and he's a fucking fruitcake, too.

How very open minded of you. This resembles a religious view of the world more closely than a scientific view, IMHO.

"…we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate…"

Which is still true, for the most part. We know that part of the answer is the CO2 coming out of our factories and cars, but we also know that isn't the whole story (or even how much of the story it is).

Yes, you muppet, weather and the ecosystem are complex interdependent systems. Which is why short-term patterns are hard to predict but long-term trends reveal themselves through data.

Your laughie at the end of your sentence shows you don't understand science. Not that you've failed to grasp this issue, but that you don't understand fundamental science. It makes you look ignorant. Not clever.

For example, the Pentagon in 2004 stated there was a good chance that 'global warming' could lead to the UK freezing as the changes to global oceanic heat conveyers stopped conveying heat to the UK. Which is more northerly then every major Canadian city.

And by the way, Mr. Scientist, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data' as the saying goes, but you're clevererererere then all the scientists so you probably knew that.

Bell end.

Yes, Harald, we know....

Your post is a perfect example of how skeptics of Teh Global Warming are treated.

Step 1: Call the person an idiot. This is a required first step.

Step 2: Dismiss any data or anecdotal evidence he/she provides. This is done because while you put on a front of open-minded intellectual curiosity, your mind is made up. Teh Global Warming is coming to get us. Nothing will sway you...not data that shows the Earth is not actually warming, not scientists that claim sunspot activity is more responsible for temperature than greenhouse gases and not even data that shows the Earth is actually not warming at all.

Step 3: Cite a vague prediction from a very official-sounding report, such as "a 2004 Pentagon Study" or what not. Of course, such predictions are almost entirely speculative.

Step 4: Take issue with the political or economic motivations of your opponent.

Step 5: Ignore the political and economic motivations of those who support and promote Teh Global Warming hysteria. This is done either out of intellectual dishonesty or plain ignorance...perhaps both.

Step 6. Call the person an idiot, again. See, only those who accept the premise of Teh Global Warming could possibly comprehend science. Most of those people know no more about science than I do, but for some reason they "understand science."

I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.

That's what I thought you were talking about. You said there was a scientific consensus that the earth was cooling - that is not true. There was a Newsweek article. There are tons of magazine reports all kinds of stuff. But there is no comparison between that article and the real consensus of scientists and thousands of scientific papers demonstrating man-made global warming.

Your post is a perfect example of how skeptics of Teh Evolution are treated.

Step 1: Call the person an idiot. This is a required first step.

Step 2: Dismiss any data or anecdotal evidence he/she provides. This is done because while you put on a front of open-minded intellectual curiosity, your mind is made up. Teh Evolution ocurred. Nothing will sway you...not data that shows the Grand Canyon was made by The Flood, not scientists that fossils are only 6,000 years old and not even the first Chapter of the Holy Bible.

Step 3: Cite all the evidence you like, from the fields of cosmology, anatomy, geology, palæontology, anthropology, palæoanthroplogy or interior decorating. It won't make any difference, no matter how comprehensive, logical or well-attested.

Step 4: Take issue with the political or economic motivations of your opponent.

Step 5: Ignore the political and economic motivations of those who support and promote Teh Evolution. This is done either out of intellectual dishonesty or plain ignorance...perhaps both.

Step 6. Call the person an idiot, again. See, only those who accept the premise of Teh Global Evolution could possibly comprehend science. Most of those people know no more about science than I do, but for some reason they "understand science."

Well the scientific consensus has sea levels rising 40 cm versus the Gore suggested 7 or more meters. Gore claims it would displace millions when that won't happen as an example.

You are mixing two different facts into the same statement.

1) The IPCC projection for sea level rise by 2100 of 40 cm, which at this point appears to be a conservative estimate based on recent peer reviewed papers examining the empirical data of actual sea level rise to date. This (sea level rise from melting) and increased translations (or accelerated movements) is perhaps the most active area of climate research. Also the IPCC estimate of 40 cm is mainly due to expansion of the water as it is heated up globally (hotter water is lass dense). We also have to deal with a built in safety net for H20 as it goes through phase transitions (solid phase to liquid phase and liquid phase to gasous phase);

[CENTER][/CENTER]

2) Gore's 7 meter scenario is what would happen if the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt completely, and this will take several hundred years, at a minimum (hopefully). But the main point of this is that; the eventual loss of the Greenland ice sheet is inevitable past a certain point of GHG buildup, because of the much slower uptake of GHG emissions (caused by humans) from the atmosphere and into the oceans and land masses, that this eventual 7 meter rise will be virtually unstoppable.

Also see an article in the February 2008 issue of Scientific American titled "The Unquiet Ice" (pp. 60-67) which covers catastrophic sea level rise due to increased ice water melt off, as this melt water pools and then sinks to the bottom of the ice sheets via moulins (holes in the ice sheets caused by ponding meltwater). This tends to lubricate the bottom of the ice sheets which causes the ice sheets to translate at greater rates into the arctic and antarctic ocean waters, The worse case scenario would be similar to mega tsunamis, as large chunks of the ice sheets slide into the oceans, since they would no longer be buttressed sufficiently by neighboring sea level ice (see for example Meltwatet Pulse 1A).

Every eye fixed itself upon him; with parted lips and bated breath the audience hung upon his words, taking no note of time, rapt in the ghastly fascinations of the tale. NOT!

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

If the greater snow-cover from this year re-establishes the fading glaciers, then I'm all for it. I love going hiking up in the high alpine during the summer here in the coastal mountains of British Columbia (partly) because there is snow on the ground year-round (subterranean glaciers keep the snow at the surface from melting). But alas, there is considerably less snow on the ground during the summer than there was even five years ago. It will probably take decades of winters like this year to un-do the loss of those glaciers. But I am looking forward to this summer to see what a wonderful summer playground this cooler winter has brought me.